A Book of Nonsense

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development of nonsense verse

Skilled literary nonsense verse is rare; most of it has been written for children and is modern, dating from the beginning of the 19th century. The cardinal date could be considered 1846, when
The Book of Nonsense was published; this was a collection of limericks composed and illustrated by the artist Edward Lear, who first created them in the 1830s for the children of the earl of Derby....

discussed in biography

...illustrations of the earl of Derby’s private menagerie at Knowsley, Lancashire. Lear had a natural affinity for children, and it was for the earl’s grandchildren that he produced
A Book of Nonsense (1846, enlarged 1861). In 1835 he decided to become a landscape painter.

place in children’s literature

...social skit enjoyed, despite the seeming dominance of the moral Barbaulds and Trimmers, a roaring success. Great nonsense verse, however, had to await the coming of a genius, Edward Lear, whose
Book of Nonsense (1846) was partly the product of an emergent and not easily explainable Victorian feeling for levity and partly the issue of a fruitfully neurotic personality, finding relief for...